This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

“Abracadabra” is a real magical spell formulated by Cabbalist magicians two thousand years ago. Originally invoked to cure mortal diseases, the spell has since been employed as the enabling word to cause the result of a magical operation. The spell can only be used to create good results, never evil (see E.A. Wallis Budge, Lewis Spence, and others) and is so powerful everyone in the world has heard of the word.

Serial 5: The Garden of Abracadabra, Vol 1 of the Abracadabra Series Lisa Mason

2

Sunset stains the sky lavender and orange by the time I crawl onto the parking lot that passes for the coastal highway. The slow-and-go affords me ample time to admire the restless gray bay and San Francisco’s enchanted spires on the opposite shore.

I take the westbound off-ramp at University Avenue and chauffeur Brand to Emeryville, an urban blight bordering Berkeley where he tells me his ex-girlfriend lives.

“Turn left,” he says. “At the next corner, turn right. At the second light, hang a left. Here we are.”

The ex-girlfriend rents the ground-floor unit of a shabby little town house slapped together decades ago of dingy stucco. Weeds thrusting through cracked concrete serve as her front yard. A graffiti artist has accomplished with cans of spray paint what government subsidies never could: given the town house some character. Lurid obscenities splatter the walls and weird, leering faces. A monstrous red eyeball weeps tears of blood, the sort of apocalyptic vision only a potent hallucinogen can inspire.

I’m jarred by the sight of rusty security grilles barring up every window and door. People in Buckeye Heights have boarded up the windows and doors of foreclosed houses but they haven’t barred up everything against the crowbar of a thief. Not like this.

The sight sobers me, reminding me I’m entering another world.

The world of Berkeley.

Berkeley, home of the original campus of the mighty University of California. Berkeley of nouvelle cuisine and Berkeley of research leading to the atom bomb. Berkeley of genetic engineering and Berkeley of needle exchanges. Berkeley of free speech and Berkeley of political correctness. Berkeley of the Tree People and Berkeley of Students Against Hippies Living In Trees.

Berkeley, a world of wonders, of enigmas.

I can feel it thrumming all around me: Magic. Black, White, and Every-Color-Of-The-Rainbow Magic.